Who's Counting?
I WAS speaking to an elderly woman who lives along my daily route to the post office, trying to explain that her garden always provides me with the perfect photo opportunity. Not the proliferation of beautiful flora or generous assortment of potted cacti, but the fact that she has so many cats.
I then asked how many of these creatures she has, expecting her to reveal the presence of three or four, but it soon transpired that she has a total of seven. I smiled and raised my eyebrows. “Oh, that's nothing,” she said in Portuguese, “the woman at the end of the street has eight.”
I haven't quite decided whether the lady is humble and self-effacing to the point of being perfectly content to hand over the crown of committed catology to her local rival with a minimum degree of fuss, or simply implying that “She's even crazier than I am!”
This may be a confusion in the subtleties of culture moment. Women with lots of cats as a social stereotype might mean different things in different countries. I've just started working for a lady with three cats. (I'm a self-employed gardener.) I guessed she is single, which is good news as she's quite attractive. In Portugal is could be cat ladies are a different phenomenon altogether. Troy, do you think however long you live there, knowing the people, marrying a native woman, having native friends, learning their language; there will be some aspects of their culture that you will never understand?